As I progress on completing my 9600, the next task is getting my Avid cards working.I have an Avid TrueVision video I/O card as well as the additional JPEG PCI board and the ribbon cable that connects the two together.while I can get the VGA output on the TrueVision board to work no problem, the system does not see the other video I/O (IE. no video input) nor does it detect the JPEG card. This probably means I need a driver for both cards however so far I have not found much.I'm not the only one who is also looking for the drivers. Another one of my friends also picked up an Avid-Ready 9600 and of course, neither had a hard drive so we could not extract the extensions/INITs and use them on our system.

I don't know about Avid drivers but you should be able to find the old Targa 2000 drivers online. If not I think I have them. Pinnacle bought Truevision but I could never find the Targa stuff by going through their website. I always had to do a search through google to get the right page. Can't find it at the moment.

Do you have any info on that second PCI card? Does it handle the MJPEG compression? The Targa manuals had a page or two on an Abekas (spelling?) 3D effects card that could be added but I've never seen any info on it or seen the Avid board called that. That small square daughterboard on the main card is normally where the compression hardware is on the Targas. There were a few different versions.

GeneratriX wrote:Looks like a Targa 2000 RTX, the one which included real-time effects. I guess your model originally included the break-out-panel instead of the more standard break-out-cable.

Hmm. These sytems obviously didn't come with breakout boxes but we did source some breakout cables though my cable is in a workshop in Vancouver right now :/.If it helps, I'll go and completely dismantle both cards. Just tell me and I'll pull the cards out again.

I seem to remember more "stuff" on the daughtercard on the DTX and RTX versions. The Targa stuff shows up on ebay relatively often and lately dirt cheap. I could barely give away a RTX and breakout box. Apparently the best thing for them on the PC side is Discreet Edit.

QuicksilverG4 wrote:I seem to remember more "stuff" on the daughtercard on the DTX and RTX versions. The Targa stuff shows up on ebay relatively often and lately dirt cheap. I could barely give away a RTX and breakout box. Apparently the best thing for them on the PC side is Discreet Edit.

Well, I could be wrong... but I think the two boards I had used to run Avid MCXpress. The first was a Targa 1000 Pro/PCI, and the second one a Targa 2000 Pro/PCI. I think all of them were three-pieces cards; you know a longer board and two daughter boards. A friend of mine also had a 2000 RTX, which included a rack mounted break-out-box.

I also seem to recall they worked with Premiere 4.2, 5.1, and 5.5 ...and I think also existed some plug-in for After Effects? I'm not sure of this.

And I'm pretty sure all of them worked pretty fine with several releases of SpeedRazor.

Well, I only had two Mac's on my whole life, and one was a Performa and the other one a 9100... but none of them had any A/V options, and I've never heared about your PCI-Janus board... all my whole experience with Targa was under PC Win NT 4.0, and some hacks to get them running under Win 2K Pro. I seem to recall for these age I was pretty anxious to have the Truevision setup working with as many softwares I could find for the platform, and indeed I've tried a lot.

And after months of hard work, a customer of mine decided to buy from me the 2000 Pro/PCI... and he was indeed a very happy owner of it for about two months, until he accidentally plugged the composite video input to the wrong RCA female, and burned up the whole input section of the board...

So, advice given: be careful with the Targa inputs... they are a bit picky, and you can burn the chips either thru static discharge, or a wrong connection that some other hardware would forgive you (i.e.: an audio output)... other than that; excellent boards, with perhaps the clearest White Balance around... but for some reason the input section seems to be a bit more fragile than others like Miro DC30+, Fast A/V Master, etc... maybe others could help a bit more here (Dr. Dave? )

Be sure to connect your system to a good GND binding post around. Anyway, I was a happy Targa owner (two systems) for about three years and never had a problem. In fact I'm sure I must have over there some (PC) apps, drivers, plug-ins, tools, etc... but hard to tell if I could find them now!

Hey!, post pictures once you have the whole setup running! All the best, Diego

Yes, the input/output and capture/playback quality is impressive! ...the Truevision stuff works well on the lines of DPS, and I think is well above the video quality from Miro DC30+ or Fast A/V Master. You know, Targa is very nice hardware stuff.

I think the video quality for composite in/out is also on the lines of the onboard video setup from SGI VW320 or the AV1 module from SGI O2.

I could not tell you how good it looks when you record from components because the only stuff for component signals I had was an italian 33" Seleco PAL-B monitor (which was excellent too), and never had any source for video on components myself... but I guess if you use the separated components for both in/out, then the quality will be outstanding.

So, as you can see; you have a nice setup there! It costed many thousands a few years ago! I guess the PCI-Janus could be probably some kind of hardware acceleration for transitions and filters... but don't take my word, since I'm only wild guessing. The real-time stuff on the RTX line from Targa was a sort of digitally controllable mixer, so when you add a transition or filter to the timeline, the effect is "mapped" to the required parameters to control real-time the video DSP for each layer. I don't know if this is the same as your Janus.

Hi, I'm a newbie. I worked on these cards back in '96 when they just came out - The station I was employed at bought a PC version of AVID MCXpress. It was one of the first releases, and needless to say the box was extremely unstable. But the cards delivered a quality that had to be seen to be believed. And up to now I have not been able to use a better interface than taht MCXPress. I was up and running with it within hours, it was so intuitive. I've been able to buy an RTX board and the MCXpress software but cannot find the drivers. That original board ran on NT; I am wondering if anyone really made it work on any other platform? The 3d effects software shipped with this board is called ELASTIC REALITY, for those who wanted to know. Would really appreciate the driver location, if anyone out there has it!

BoogWar wrote:Hi, I'm a newbie. I worked on these cards back in '96 when they just came out - The station I was employed at bought a PC version of AVID MCXpress. It was one of the first releases, and needless to say the box was extremely unstable. But the cards delivered a quality that had to be seen to be believed. And up to now I have not been able to use a better interface than taht MCXPress. I was up and running with it within hours, it was so intuitive. I've been able to buy an RTX board and the MCXpress software but cannot find the drivers. That original board ran on NT; I am wondering if anyone really made it work on any other platform? The 3d effects software shipped with this board is called ELASTIC REALITY, for those who wanted to know. Would really appreciate the driver location, if anyone out there has it!

Hi there, BoogWar. I have almost each driver that TrueVision released at the date... and I was able to make it work also with Windows 2000 Professional. I've used the two Targa boards I've owned with MCXPress and SpeedRazor (the last one never was too stable), and never had the chance to exploit the full potential, but I agree with you... the quality was impressive!

Only problem, I don't know where should I look for the drivers inside my more than 2000 CD-R based backups... if you are not too hurried, I could try to check around the weekend or next week. All the best, Diego

GeneratriX wrote:I have almost each driver that TrueVision released at the date... and I was able to make it work also with Windows 2000 Professional. I've used the two Targa boards I've owned with MCXPress and SpeedRazor (the last one never was too stable), and never had the chance to exploit the full potential, but I agree with you... the quality was impressive!

Only problem, I don't know where should I look for the drivers inside my more than 2000 CD-R based backups... if you are not too hurried, I could try to check around the weekend or next week. All the best, Diego

Old thread I know, but I must have skipped over this before. Diego, how weer you able to get the Targa cards working under Win 2K? They weren't supported past NT and all the questions I've ever seen regarding running them under 2000 were responded to with the answer that it was impossible.